An examination of recent history shows that leaders of the world's largest market economies are getting much better at following through on the commitments they make at summits, contrary to criticisms levelled by opponents of G-8, a conference was told Saturday.
"If you examine the record of compliance over time, you'll find that even though there is variation in compliance levels, overall there has been not only sustained levels of compliance, but also increases over time," said Ella Kokotsis.
Kokotsis, an expert in international relations and director of analytical studies for the University of Toronto's Centre for G-8 Research outlined her findings at a University of Calgary conference on sustaining economic growth -- one of three central planks for next week's summit in Kananaskis.
"We are finding that there is this movement towards focusing more on the aspect of followup. There is pressure on the leaders at the summit," said Kokotsis.
"There is a very strong momentum and that, of course, is evolving over time and becoming more pronounced."
Nonetheless, Kokotsis acknowledged the early years of the summits, which began in France in 1975, were less fruitful.
"In the earlier summits, there is a lot of credibility to the theory that these were nothing more than global hot-tub parties," Kokotsis observed.
More recently, the G-8 leaders made 58 specific commitments at last year's violence-plagued summit in Genoa, Italy, the bulk on development and environmental issues.
"These promises made on development issues were also substantially promises kept," Kokotsis said.
That bodes well for the upcoming summit at Kananaskis, she argued, where, beginning Wednesday, leaders are to consider a raft of programs to essentially help Africa help itself by addressing disease, poverty, trade, investment and democratization.
Later at the conference, another sacred cow of G-8 opponents was gored when U of C management Prof. Alain Verbeke noted multinational firms, at the forefront of globalization, in most cases, have better environmental and labour standards than their domestic counterparts.
"The biggest problem of globalization is that there is just not enough of it," Verbeke said. "There is an enormous body of empirical evidence . . . that demonstrates that the world should be more global."
He argued the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998 may have reversed 50 years of efforts to liberalize world trade and reinvigorated efforts to strengthen world trade-restricting trading blocs.
"A key message to civil society then is that the demise of global trading and investment liberalization -- where the World Trade Organization is one example -- leads to really second-best arrangements in the form of regional, triad-based (North America, Europe and Japan) government policies and corporate strategies," said Verbeke. "The point is it's worse, it's not as good, as globalization. From a comparative institutional perspective, this tendency towards regionalization harms civil society."
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